“I have whatever’s left from the things I’ve broken; my wife, my child… children.”
“Those things weren’t your fault. Your wife was terrible to you.”
“She did what she was made to do. She made me miserable because I was blind, because I wanted to be made miserable. It wasn’t her fault. I was ignorant.”
“You were generous.”
“I almost killed my son. My own boy.”
“He…”
“He was all the son I had. He was son enough. And he was innocent. Like Franny. Innocent and sweet and stupid.”
“The boy in Saint Louis… Mr. Moretti.”
“What?”
“He might change his mind. He may be your son. I think he is.”
Ralph’s hand took hers. They stared at each other across the snowy linen.
“Then he’s a liar. He’ll never change his mind. Everything has failed. It was all for nothing.”
He had made his efforts. He had hired detectives, strangers, to find his son. He had placed a shameless advertisement in the newspapers in Chicago and Saint Louis and Philadelphia and San Francisco and he had received and answered the many letters and he had made his choice. His son had turned out to be a phantom. His illegitimate son, he was aware. His wife had turned out to be the person he had waited for ever since the day he had driven Emilia away. Poison. The life he had was the life he had made, no more, no less, and he wouldn’t struggle anymore, wouldn’t try to change the course of events.
“What will you do today?”
“I feel so lazy, like a cat. I’ll read. I’ll sew. I’ll ask Mrs. Larsen if she wants any help and she’ll say no. I’ll wait for you.”
“And does that make you happy?”
“It’s all I need. It’s all I ever wanted.”
When she was in the bath, he looked for the poison. He looked in her sewing basket. He searched the pockets of her dresses. He looked through the few contents of her dressing table. He never found anything. It was like a giddy game to him, an Easter egg hunt, and he didn’t really care whether he found it or not. He felt it was his duty to look. He would never have confronted her, no matter what he found. He was agitated when he woke, and he wanted to find something, anything, that would prove what he knew to be true. Nothing would matter. She would do as she liked. She wanted everything, he supposed, the house, the money, everything, and he would have given it to her, all of it, if she had asked. He would have lived alone with nothing, if she had wanted. And he would die, if that’s what she required.
Mrs. Larsen told him Catherine was restless during the day. Mrs. Larsen assumed she was bored, confined in the big house with nothing to do. Nothing was holding her in. She could go to town now, buy odds and ends, visit ladies she might have met. But she rarely went out, except to the snowy garden. She sometimes walked the road, in the thinning snow, peering into the ruts here and there as though she were trying to find something, but she always came home empty-handed.
Larsen found them in the end. Coming home with rabbits over his shoulder, he looked down and saw a glitter through the mud and picked up her little jewels and rubbed them with his finger until they sparkled in the sun. He brought them home, went straight into Catherine where she sat playing the piano, the dead rabbits still hanging over his shoulder, his muddy boots on the rug from France. He held out his open hand; she took her things.
“This is it, ain’t it? What you been looking for?”
“They are, Mr. Larsen. They mean nothing now. But I thank you. I’ll put them away. I wore them once, in another place.”
Truitt knew it. He heard it before darkness fell, from Mrs. Larsen, but he never asked, and he never saw the trinkets she had brought with her. Women’s things, jewelry, rubies or glass, they were all the same.
A widow in town took strychnine, the poison scalding her blood, the bile spewing from her mouth as she lay on the kitchen floor, a cake cooling on the kitchen table. A young man threw his only daughter down a well and smoked a cigarette as she drowned. Such things happened.
Ralph didn’t go to the funerals or the trials. He couldn’t stand the idea of being in a crowd of people. He couldn’t stand the idea of being looked at. He felt the winter would never end, just as each day he couldn’t wait for the hours in his office to be over. He felt he would go crazy until he sat again at the long table, listening to the soothing voice of his young wife.
Every death was the death of Antonio. Every crime was the disappearance of his boy. He wept during the day. He wept on the long ride home from his office. He wept every morning as he woke up. And Catherine was the only thing that could ease his sorrow.
Such things happen, he would think as he drove home, the road ahead blurred with tears. The winters were long and life was hard and children died and religion was terror, so he would weep for these sad people, and weep as well for his own Antonio, his own child down the well. He would weep because there had been no trial, no retribution, no one to protect or save the boy from his father’s terrible anger. He had escaped unscathed, and Antonio had run away and been lost in the brutal world, while he rode home in his clean clothes to be poisoned by his beautiful wife.
And so he wept.
She got up to change the sheets in the middle of the night. Her arms flew out, and the linens flew across the bed like great birds. Her hands smoothed the sheets, her arms stuffed the pillows into the cases and she piled them, pillow after pillow, on the great bed.
She put on her nightdress and lay beneath the covers. Mrs. Larsen would find the ruined sheets in the linen closet. Catherine patted his side of the bed, and he lay his head on the pillow and stared into her beautiful, calm face. She looked so far away. She was so beloved.
His heart pounded in his chest. His hand reached under her nightdress and lay along her thigh.
“I know what you’re doing. I know what’s happening to me.”
“I…”
“Don’t say anything. Don’t speak. We’ll never mention it again. I just wanted you to know that I know, that it’s all right. I don’t mind. I forgive you. Just…”
Her hands were frozen still. Her eyes were wide in the moonlight. They spoke in whispers.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, what you’re talking about.”
“When it gets worse, if that’s what you want, make it go quickly. I’ve waited so long to see what would happen, and now I know, and it’s fine, it’s fine with me, but I want it to go quickly. I don’t want to suffer.”
“You’re tired. Sleep now. I don’t know what you’re saying. I would never want you to suffer.”
He could feel the blood pulsing through the vein of her leg. He could see her eyes dart away from him, dart toward the moonlight. She put out her hand and closed his eyes. She kept her cold hand over his lids, her breath shushed him in his ear, as one might calm a child to sleep, a child who had waked from a nightmare.
“I’ll never talk about it again. You are free.”
“This doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what you’re saying. I love you.”
She had never said it before. No one had said it to him for more than twenty years, yet he believed her. She loved him, and she was the thing that was bringing his death, an end to his torment. She was the angel of his death. And he loved her with all his heart.
She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want to watch him die. She truly loathed the idea of him suffering or sickening or any of the things that were about to happen. But she knew that, any day, a letter might come, a letter that would end it all. Love and money-she had promised herself these two things, but she realized more and more that maybe one person got only one thing, and she would not, could not be ruined. She would live in the gutter, Antonio had said. She would grow sad and disheveled, and eventually she would die. But whatever happened, she could only save herself.
A man ate an entire dictionary and died. Larsen cut off his own burned hand with an axe, believing the burn which would not heal was the kiss of the devil, the ineradicable mark of sin, while Mrs. Larsen watched and screamed. As a boy of fifteen, he had fought in the Civil War and come home without a scratch. Now he lay, a drooling idiot with one hand, in an expensive Catholic hospital in Chicago, paid for by Truitt, while Mrs. Larsen never mentioned him again. Such things happened.
